The best new gear of Musikmesse 2016: news, photos and video

Our guitar, tech and drum highlights from Frankfurt

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Messe mopped up

MUSIKMESSE 2016: It might not have the 'first exhibition of the year' buzz of the NAMM Show or the cool factor of new fairs on the block such as Superbooth16, but the Frankfurt Musikmesse is still a big deal.

In fact, as far as music making equipment trade shows in Europe go, it's the biggest of deals, so from 7 to 10 April, all of MusicRadar's many eyes will be on it.

DigiTech Whammy Ricochet

While we were over at the DigiTech booth at NAMM earlier this year, we let out a desperate plea to marketing manager Tom Cram: “Make a mini Whammy!” we cried. To which Cram replied, “Well, I’ve got something hidden away… but I can’t show you yet.”

It appears the Ricochet is what Cram was referring to, and now it’s here, we’re in two minds: on the one hand, it’s brilliant for anyone after Whammy swoops and dives from a small footprint; on the other, we wish it had an expression output for players seeking to downsize from the big ol’ treadle-equipped Whammy.

Either way, we’re looking forward to getting our hands on it: a commendable range of intervals (including the all-important octaves), choice of momentary or latched switching and the Whammy’s world-beating tracking make this one of the most exciting products in DigiTech’s product line-up so far.

Boss VE-8 Acoustic Singer

The latest multi-effects offering from Boss makes a lot of sense. Creating an all-in-one solution for singing guitarists is nothing new, but designing something for acoustic singer-songwriters? Now, that’s a good idea.

What we like most is the fact that Boss hasn’t tried to make the VE-8 everything to all (wo)men: rather, it’s stuck to useful effects for acoustic players and singers, focusing on harmonies, distorted vocals, an easy-to-use looper and one-knob piezo tone enhancer.

The effects, too, are well-considered: chorus, reverb, octaver, delay. You don’t need more than that. Judging from social media, responses to the video below have been mixed, but it actually sounds pretty good to us - nobody really expects real-time multi-effects harmonies to sound exactly like human beings, do they?

Epiphone Ltd Ed Brent Hinds Flying V Custom

After years of back and forth with first Gibson and then Epiphone (as detailed over on Hinds’s Instagram account), Mastodon's lead machine finally got his hands on a signature model - and boy, is it sweet.

For one, Silverburst is among the coolest finishes known to man, but more importantly, Epiphone’s Custom Shop has been playing an absolute blinder lately, as recent signature models from Messrs Lee Malia, Björn Gelotte and Gary Clark Jr attest.

We’re very taken by the prospect of Brent’s own Lace USA pickups, too, and if the price clocks in at around the £599-£699 mark, like other signature Epis, this could make for one of the best-value Flying Vs around.

Boss RC-202

Looping and effects are two things that Boss knows all about, and the RC-202 marries its expertise in both fields.

With one-man/woman performers currently in vogue, we think there'll be plenty of demand for this desktop unit, which enables you to work with two stereo loops simultaneously and promises more real-time processing than any other product of its type.

Softube Modular

So you want to get into Eurorack modular but don't have the time, money or space to put a hardware system together: what do you do?

Softube might have the answer in the form of its succinctly-named Modular plugin, which includes officially-endorsed modules from Doepfer and Intelligel (we're told that more companies will be getting onboard soon).

In short, this is Eurorack in software, with the basic plugin costing $99 and further modules available as optional extras.

Tverb takes the iconic effect that Visconti created when he was recording the vocals for Bowie's Heroes and uses this as its starting point. It integrates three completely independent lush reverbs, with compression and selectable polar patterns on microphone 1 and adjustable gates on microphones 2 and 3.